The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination - Hardcover

Guerrieri, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307593282 ISBN 13: 9780307593283

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012

Synopsis

A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
Los Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the Year

A unique and revelatory book of music history that examines in great depth what is perhaps the best-known and most-popular symphony ever written and its four-note opening, which has fascinated musicians, historians, and philosophers for the last two hundred years.

Music critic Matthew Guerrieri reaches back before Beethoven’s time to examine what might have influenced him in writing his Fifth Symphony, and forward into our own time to describe the ways in which the Fifth has, in turn, asserted its influence. He uncovers possible sources for the famous opening notes in the rhythms of ancient Greek poetry and certain French Revolutionary songs and symphonies. Guerrieri confirms that, contrary to popular belief, Beethoven was not deaf when he wrote the Fifth. He traces the Fifth’s influence in China, Russia, and the United States (Emerson and Thoreau were passionate fans) and shows how the masterpiece was used by both the Allies and the Nazis in World War II. Altogether, a fascinating piece of musical detective work—a treat for music lovers of every stripe. 

About this title

Review

Essay by Author, Matthew Guerrieri

In his bestseller Beethoven: the Man who Freed Music, first published in 1929, the poet and essayist Robert Haven Schauffler polled a parade of opinions of Beethoven’s Fifth from a pool of straw men: “To Brown it may signify a fierce conflict with a sexual obsession. To Jones a desperate campaign against an inferiority complex. To Robinson an old-fashioned pitched battle à la “Paradise Lost,” between the forces of good and evil. To a victim of hysteria it may depict a war between sanity and bedlam. To a neurasthenic a struggle between those two mutually exclusive objectives: ‘To be, or not to be?’ To an evolutionist it may bring up the primordial conflict of fire and water, of man with beast, of civilization with savagery, of land with sea.”

Such mutable celebrity has perpetually surrounded the symphony. Beethoven’s Fifth, the Symphony in C minor, opus 67, might not be the greatest piece of music ever written—even Beethoven himself preferred his Third Symphony, the Eroica—but it must be the greatest “great piece” ever written, a figure on which successive mantles of greatness have, ever more inevitably, fit with tailored precision. And its iconic opening is a large part of that: short enough to remember and portentous enough to be memorable, seeming to unlock the symphony’s meaning but leaving its mysteries temptingly out of reach, saying something but admitting nothing.

The First Four Notes is a book about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. More specifically, it is a book about the opening notes of that symphony; and more specifically than that, it is a book about what people have heard in those notes throughout history, and how history itself has affected what was heard. It is, then, history viewed through the forced perspective of one piece of music (though, to be fair, there is only a handful of pieces of music that could yield a comparable view, and most of them are by Beethoven).

To say a piece of music has meaning is to say that it is susceptible to discussions of meaning; by that standard, Beethoven’s Fifth is easily one of the most meaningful pieces of music ever written. The number and variety of the interpretations assigned to the Fifth, the creativity with which the piece has been invoked in support of countless, often contradictory causes—artistic, philosophical, political—is a tribute to its amorphous power. It is also, on the side of the interpreters, a testament to human creativity, ingenuity—and folly. The vaunted universality of Beethoven’s achievement encompasses the sublime and the ridiculous.

Not that he didn’t try to warn us. In 1855, an unknown writer felt compelled to make a handwritten addition to a copy of Anton Schindler’s biography of Beethoven: “Something about the beginning of the C minor Symph[ony]. Many men were disturbed over the beginning of the Fifth. One of them ask[ed] Beethoven about the reason for the unusual opening and its meaning. Beethoven answered: ‘The beginning sounds and means: You are too dumb.’”

— Matthew Guerrieri (adapted from the prologue to The First Four Notes)

About the Author

Matthew Guerrieri is a music critic for The Boston Globe, and his articles have also appeared in Vanity Fair, NewMusicBox, Playbill, and Slate. He is responsible for the popular classical music blog Soho the Dog (sohothedog.blogspot.com). He lives in Framingham, Massachusetts. 

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0307593282
• ISBN 13: 9780307593283
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384